Former Communist leader, Marchais, dies aged 77

Mr Georges Marchais (77), the steel worker who led the French Communist Party (PCF) with Stalinist severity for nearly a quarter of a century, died yesterday morning at the Lariboisiere Hospital in Paris. Mr Marchais had suffered from heart trouble for the past 20 years.

Rarely has one man so totally controlled a political movement in the West. Mr Marchais joined the Communist Party in 1947. A faithful defender of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, he rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the deputy secretary general in 1970 and secretary general two years later. Until his retirement in 1994, when he was replaced by Mr Robert Hue, Georges Marchais was the PCF and the PCF was Georges Marchais.

In his eyes, the Soviet Union, which financed his party, could do no wrong. Mr Marchais went on television in Moscow in 1979 to justify the Red Army's invasion of Afghanistan. His failure to distance himself from the increasingly discredited Soviet system was blamed for the decline of the party in France. Even after perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr Marchais persisted in loyalty to Communist practices and ideals; his death occurred at an appropriate moment, when the party's new leadership is abandoning old Communist dogma.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr Marchais became a popular French television personality. The tirades he delivered in an exaggerated working class accent made him a colourful, often clownish character. But despite his notoriety, the PCF lost two-thirds of its voters under his stewardship, falling from close to a quarter of the French electorate to about 8 per cent. In 1981, an alliance of the PCF and the Socialists brought the left to power for the first time since the 1950s. Mr Marchais chose four Communist cabinet ministers, whom he withdrew from the government three years later when he felt the PS was suffocating his own party.

Mr Marchais's second World War record was a subject of controversy. He claimed he was one of a million Frenchmen forced to work in German labour camps under the Service du Travail Obligatoire, but critics claimed he had volunteered to go to Nazi Germany.

Mr Hue said yesterday that he was "overwhelmed" by Mr Marchais's death. "He gave so much of himself to his party. People were so unfair to him; we will remember his generosity and his fighting spirit."

President Chirac saluted his "great sincerity". Only the former Gaullist prime minister, Mr Edouard Balladur, was honest enough to say what everyone knew: that Georges Marchais had prevented the PCF from reforming itself. In tribute to him, the red flag was raised outside the party's headquarters on the Place du Colonel-Fabien for the first time in years.

As Mr Marchais lay dying last week, the party he long symbolised continued its lovefest with the ruling Socialists. Mr JeanClaude Gayssot, the Communist Transport Minister, is widely credited with bringing the lorry drivers' strike to an early conclusion.